Fallout series creator and legendary designer Tim Cain has been sharing stories of game development on YouTube for a while now and recently claimed that, to his knowledge, the source code for the first few Fallout games on PC had been lost after Interplay—the original publisher—ordered it to be destroyed.
"When I left Fallout, I was told 'you have to destroy everything you have, and I did," said Cain on his YouTube channel. "My entire archive, early design notes, code for different versions, prototypes, all the GURPS code… gone."
However, speaking to VideoGamer, Interplay Productions founder and game designer Rebecca Heineman revealed that she preserved the source code for both of the original Fallout games and several other Interplay titles.
Heineman says she started archiving the source code after working on Interplay’s 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection, a compilation of the company’s games ranging from 1983 to 1993.
She tells VideoGamer:
I have the source to all my projects, so most games I got running on the CD without issue. Wasteland, was ported to PC by someone else, so I asked for the source and was given a blank stare. I went to the COO’s office and he gave me a cardboard box that looked like it was run over by a truck and it had some of the source on floppies. I ended up contacting friends at Electronic Arts to get a copy of the source we sent them when Wasteland shipped.
I made it a quest to snapshot everything and archive it on CD-Roms. When I left Interplay in 1995, I had copies of every game we did. No exceptions. When I did MacPlay, which existed beyond my tenure at Interplay, every game we ported, I snapshotted. It included Fallout 1 and 2.
So why did Cain assume the source code was lost? Heineman explains this was down to how Interplay reacted to staff who left the company:
Interplay had issues with people leaving the firm, and if you quit, they got… testy. I was a founder, so when I left, I kept EVERYTHING.
Interplay had a reputation of threatening ex-employees with litigation if they were ‘poached’, and if they had assets taken home. However, they had no legal leg to stand on which was why a suit was never filed on anyone. [If] they did have a legal leg to stand on, I would have been sued into last week.
Heineman adds that, when she gets time, she intends to explore ways of getting Fallout 1 & 2's source code published online.